


Liminal Space

by rufeepeach



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Anti-Hook, Car Sex, F/M, Infidelity, anti-mila, lacey and belle are the same person, why oh why won't the character tags reflect that?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-09 01:27:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10400655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: Outside a bar in the middle of nowhere, Mr Gold finds an angry young woman named Lacey beating up her cheating boyfriend's car. When he discovers that the boyfriend is Killian Jones, the man he knows is sleeping with his wife, he sees fit to join in.What follows is a long, strange night of diner coffee, personal revelations, and criminality, which leaves neither one of them the same person they were when they met.Note: this is actually Rumbelle, not Golden Lace.





	1. Reach Out

**Author's Note:**

> So this is heavily Milah-critical and Hook-critical. As in: both are presented as emotional abusers, so if you're a fan of either one I'd stay away. There's also infidelity, although considering the marriage is already pretty much over and both parties know their partners have already cheated, your mileage may vary on that. 
> 
> Also, while it starts out looking like Golden Lace, I promise this is a Rumbelle fic.

Lacey hadn’t known that Longbourne, Maine, population 5,000, even had a bar. But then, until tonight she’d only ever read the name on the occasional road sign – she supposed she hadn’t given the matter any thought one way or the other.

Not only did Longbourne apparently have a watering hole, it had an impressively seedy-looking, smoky, gritty one at that. And Killian’s vintage black Mustang, his pride and joy, was parked right outside.

“’ _Oh no, baby_ ,’” Lacey muttered under her breath, her blood beginning to boil and seethe in her veins as she pictured her boyfriend’s wide, appealing eyes just that morning. “ _You know I always work Thursdays, why’re you so paranoid_?’ Bullshit!”

She grabbed her handbag and yanked her keys out of the ignition, slamming the door behind her so hard the car rocked from side to side with the impact. She had no idea what she was going to say, but whatever it was it’d probably be accompanied by a hearty slap. Or maybe she’d throw a drink in the face of the woman he’d been texting last night, the one he was meeting here where he thought Lacey wouldn’t know.

More likely she’d burst into tears and embarrass herself. She wanted to be so hard, tough as nails, but something about him brought out the softhearted girl she buried deep inside.

Killian was a grand master of talking his way out of it. He’d turn on the charm, and talk her around until it all seemed like her fault. He’d make her feel like she’d failed him by not trusting him, so she’d go home and cry about what a terrible girlfriend she was and be so grateful when he came to forgive her.

It had happened before, she thought grimly, stopping just sort of the door to the bar. And it wasn’t like she was such a prize anyway. Her hand reached out to grab the handle; she paused mid-motion.

Lacey always hated herself after they fought. She let him manipulate her, always ended up taking all the blame for whatever had happened. She’d end up apologising, and remember that she was a human disaster area, and that with all her issues and her baggage she was lucky he put up with her at all. Without him, she’d be alone.

Just that moment, ‘alone’ sounded far better than lied to, betrayed, and humiliated. But the moment would pass, and he would still be all she had.

She sighed, frustrated, and lowered her hand.

She couldn’t face him. She just couldn’t bear to go in there, and see him with whomever it was he had chosen over her. She just… couldn’t. Somehow, no matter what she called herself or where she lived, what life she made for herself, she always ended up losing.

She turned back around and sighed into to the empty night air, her shoulders dropped, her head hung with shame. Even now, she was too weak to tell him what an asshole he was to his face. Even in this he won.

His car still sat there, gleaming in the streetlights – the car he definitely loved more than her, and more than the woman he had met in the bar. The Jolly Roger, he called it: sleek, black, and deadly. He washed it every weekend; he’d even, on occasion, made Lacey take her heels off before he’d drive her home.

He’d die if anything happened to that car.

Before she knew it, Lacey had her car key grasped in her clenched fist like a weapon. She stalked over to the car with deadly intent, and before she could talk herself out of it, she sank the sharp point deep into the pristine paintwork. She couldn’t face Killian, but she could sure as hell _de_ face the love of his miserable life.

It made a satisfying metallic noise, and did an impressive amount of damage for such a small weapon. It felt like stabbing _him_ , and for a moment Lacey relished it, revelled in it. She dragged the key along the doors, scoring a deep gash into the side of Killian’s dearest possession, the thing he loved most. The paint split and screeched, the metal scoring. Lacey heard herself laughing, a sound as sharp and unpleasant as the tearing paintwork.

She was breathing hard when she reached the taillights, and looked back at her handiwork: a thick, harsh line of torn silver now marred the smooth, shiny black. It’d be expensive to fix that, she thought, and it’d break his heart when he saw it.

For symmetry, it only made sense to do the other side. She sank the key into the bodywork again, stabbing deep as if to compensate for the knife in her back. She really enjoyed the screech and scrape of the key this time as she pulled it back toward the bonnet, scoring her vengeance into the sleek black paint.

“Ha!” she cried, and her voice echoed through the dark night. “Take that!”

She rocked back on her heels, and felt a rush of unaccustomed power at seeing what damage she could actually do. She hated him so much in that moment it hurt, and it felt good to take it out on something he loved, to be able to share just a little of the pain he caused her.

Another car pulled up before she had a chance to do anything more, totalling four in the parking lot. She assumed most people in Longbourne walked, what with it being a very small town. The sound coming from the bar had indicated more than just two people – she assumed the station wagon parked off to the left either belonged to Killian’s date, or some innocent bystander.

Now her beat up old car, his keyed Mustang, and the station wagon were joined by the most intimidating, pristine black Cadillac Lacey had ever seen in her life. She gave it an appraising look, intrigued: did Podunk-nowhere Longbourne have a secret Mafia underbelly she’d never heard about? She couldn’t imagine anyone else driving a car like that.

A man got out of the vehicle, and made for the bar. He was a short, slight man in his mid-fifties, with greying dark hair he wore to his shoulders and a gold-tipped cane, wearing the most expensive suit Lacey had ever seen in her life. He really could have been a mobster with a look like that, but something in his face told her otherwise. He looked… harried, worried, miserable, and somehow resigned to feeling that way. He looked small, his handsome face careworn and soft.

She watched, fascinated, as he walked right by her and did the exact same dance at the door she had: _reach out, pause, breathe, return_.

He paced back, then stopped dead in his tracks. He saw the key marks.

“Don’t worry,” she said, when his eyes widened at the sight of the damage, and her tellingly stained car key. “This was a targeted assassination, your car’s safe.”

“I… I see,” he said, a little line appearing between his eyebrows. Lacey gave a hysterical giggle. The whole situation was so ridiculous, so dramatic and painful and awful and cathartic, that she couldn’t contain it.

“You planning to go inside, then?” she asked. The man considered his position. Then he sighed, his shoulders stooping, his head bowed. He cut an impressive figure, but the posture made him seem old, tired, and achingly sad.

“In a moment, perhaps,” he murmured. Now he’d said more than two words, she detected the hint of an accent in his voice. Maybe Scottish, she thought – somewhere European, anyway.

He walked past her, and sank back against the front of his Cadillac, his hands braced on his cane between his legs. It was a compromise, she thought: the same as hers. A way of killing time before making the crucial decision: to stay, or to leave.

Lacey sighed, and shook her head. Well, that ended that little escapade. No way she could keep wrecking Killian’s stupid car with a witness.

She kept eyeing the car, speculatively. She’d had a boyfriend in another life, Will, who had known how to hotwire an older vehicle. The Jolly Roger was certainly old enough, but she wasn’t certain she remembered how to do it without electrocuting herself. Keying the car was a great start: driving it into a ditch would be better. However, the gentleman with the Cadillac would probably testify against her. Lacey didn’t fancy jail time for grand theft auto, especially not for Killian’s sake.

“I’m sorry, miss,” the man spoke again, startling her out of her insane thoughts. “I don’t suppose you’re a local?”

“Nope,” she popped the ‘p’. “Do I sound local to you?”

“I meant do you live nearby?” he replied, testily. She shook her head.

“Never set foot here before tonight,” she replied. “Why?”

The man sighed, and shook his head. “Never mind.”

Lacey shrugged, “O-okay then,” she muttered. They lapsed into silence. Lacey wondered if it was time to just give up and go home, pack her things before Killian could come find her and go stay with Mulan. No way could he seek retribution if she was with a friend, and Mulan had three black belts and had offered, more than once, to ‘take his pasty date-rape ass down’ the moment Lacey asked her to.

Mulan had made that offer after the incident with Killian and Rory at Thanksgiving, when her patience had finally run out. The unstated condition was that Lacey be willing to leave him for good, and get her life back together. Go back to school. Call her father. Stop pretending her middle name was her only name. Mulan had a whole list of demands, in return for her help.

Until tonight, Lacey hadn’t wanted any of that. She’d believed there was a connection between herself and Killian, something raw and real, something that ran vital and deep that her friends just couldn’t understand. Now, knowing for sure he’d abused her trust, Lacey felt like the veil had been ripped from her eyes.

She wasn’t special, not to him or to anyone else. She wasn’t anything.

Lacey knew that feeling. She’d sworn, once, that she’d never let herself feel it again. How many times could one rebuild a life and begin again, before it stopped mattering?

She looked up, and found the man’s eyes on her. She wondered what she must look like to him; what kind of crazy, violent criminal he must think she was.

“Listen, I don’t key cars on the regular, or anything. Like, not for fun.”

“I didn’t presume,” the man said, quickly. She nodded.

“Well, good,” she said. “Because this was my first time. Keying a car, I mean. And I had a good reason.”

“I’m sure you did,” he said, shortly. Lacey sighed: clearly he just wanted to watch her because he couldn’t make his own damn mind up, and she was a distraction. Mr Aloof Stranger didn’t want to give anything in return.

“Why’re you here, then?” she asked, when he didn’t fill the silence. He sighed; his mouth formed a thin line, and his dark eyes turned wistfully on the bar. There was a long pause: for a moment, Lacey thought he would never answer at all.

“I came to fetch my wife,” he said, like an admission of guilt. “She said she’d be home hours ago, but…”

The sentence hung, unfinished. Lacey knew how that story ended; it was her story too.

“I’m sorry,” Lacey muttered, guilty now for having pried into his personal life, just to keep her own miserable mind occupied. “I’m guessing you’re not concerned she’s been kidnapped or abducted by aliens?”

“Oh no,” he replied, bitterly. “I know she’s inside. I just need to find the courage to go in and find her.”

“I know the feeling,” Lacey agreed. She went to stand just along from him, leaning against the bonnet of her beat up old banger as he leaned on his slick Cadillac’s. The Jolly Roger sat between them, in all its keyed glory. “My boyfriend’s in there,” she continued, nodding to the bar. “He said he was at work, but I saw him texting a woman last night and arrange to meet and, well, I sort of stalked him.”

“Hence the keying of the car.” The man nodded. “I see.”

“I just… I wanted him to hurt how I’m hurting, you know?”

“You’ll find no judgement here, dearie,” he said. “I’ve done far worse damage than petty vandalism, I assure you.”

Lacey considered that, tipping her head to one side to look around at him. “Your wife did the same, then?” she asked.

It was a deeply personal question, inappropriate, but out it came. At midnight, in the parking lot of a nothing bar in a nothing town, far from her bed and farther still from home, it felt as if nothing really counted. What did it matter what this stranger thought of her? They’d never see each other again anyhow. The night covered and concealed all manner of sins. Here in this parking lot, she could be anyone, say anything, and it would all be wiped clean come morning.

It was a wonderful feeling, liberating and loose, this sense of falling in-between. How long had it been, since she’d given herself room to release all that was in her chest?

“Every Friday night, at this time, she comes to this bar,” the man told her. “She calls it ‘book club’, but one night she forgot her coat so I tried to drop it off for her at her friend’s house. She had stopped attending the book club, apparently, a while back.”

“So you’re a stalker too, then,” Lacey said, with a soft snort. “Join the club.”

“Four weeks ago, I followed her here,” he said. “I went inside, found her drinking and playing pool with a group of men, and asked her to come home. She did, grudgingly, complaining the whole way about how I’d humiliated her. I’ve done the same every week since.”

Lacey stared at him, “You didn’t leave her back then?” she asked, incredulous. “When you know she lied to you?”

“We have a son,” the man explained, and his whole face seemed to crumple, his voice softening at mention of his child. “He’s only a wee lad, he needs his mother. I don’t need her home for my sake. Doubtless I’d be happier, or at least my life would be quieter, were I able to simply cut her loose. But for him, I go inside every week, and I grovel for her to come home.”

Lacey stared at him, a strange, deep admiration welling inside her. “That’s remarkably brave,” she told him. “A huge sacrifice to make for your child, Mr…”

“Gold,” he told her, shortly. “And it’s pure cowardice, I assure you. If I were… well, I’m not, so it doesn’t matter.”

“You want cowardice, Mr Gold?” Lacey asked, raising her eyebrows, accepting the challenge. “At Thanksgiving, Killian – my boyfriend – made a pass at my friend Rory in the bathroom. And I don’t mean he just tried to kiss her, I mean she had to use self-defence to get out of there. Somehow, when I confronted him, he convinced me that Rory was the one I shouldn’t speak to anymore. He told me she was trying to break us up because she was jealous and wanted him for herself, and I believed him. It was three weeks before anyone could convince me otherwise, and Rory’s still upset about it. Her girlfriend has barely spoken to me since. Then again at New Year, he got wasted and threw up on my shoes, then made it somehow my fault for letting him drink. And I apologised to him!”

She threw up her hands, furious at herself. She half-hoped Mr Gold would mock her, go cold and scornful, and thus validate the sick knot of self-loathing in her gut. Now she looked at the last few months with evidence of his deception, she could hardly stomach the things she’d let him get away with. She’d tried so hard to be who she needed to be, the tough strong woman she’d made to paper over the cracks. In the end, she’d clearly failed.

Instead of sneering, Mr Gold was looking at her closely, his head tipped to one side and brow furrowed. His expression had changed: there was anger there, yes, but laced now with suspicion, and not really aimed at her. “Did you say Killian?”

“Oh yeah, great name right?” Lacey rolled her eyes, “Killian Jones. I mean okay, we get it, you’ve got this Celtic rock star thing going, but sometimes it’s just kind of overkill with the rings and the leather and everything, you know? I mean, I guess I used to find it sexy but the more I think about it, it’s all just fucking skin deep, you know?”

Mr Gold had swallowed hard, his face paling with rage. Lacey recoiled just a little as his thin lips spread in the cruellest, most mirthless smile she’d ever seen. She hadn’t known a smile could be so cold.

“Your boyfriend is Killian Jones,” he said, as if a missing piece had clicked into place. “And he arranged to meet a woman here, tonight.”

“Do you know him?” Lacey asked, a little unnerved by the sudden change in his demeanour. “What, does he owe you money or something?”

“Not quite,” Mr Gold snarled. He pushed himself up off the front of the Cadillac, and now as he walked, he walked with purpose. His stance had lost its misery, its submissiveness and defeat. His shoulders swayed just a little, his walk slow, dangerous, like a predator stalking prey. It was more than a little sexy. “You said this was his car?” he asked, pointing to the Jolly Roger. Lacey nodded.

“The Jolly Roger in all its glory,” she said, folding her arms tight across her body. “Well, slightly diminished now, but you get the idea.”

Mr Gold pressed his lips hard together, and nodded to the gashes in the sides. “Well, that was a good start,” he muttered. He braced himself with his feet apart, raised his cane, and swung it under-arm, handle-first into the front headlight. There was an almighty crash as it shattered and broke, splintering into a million pieces. Lacey’s hands flew to her mouth: a shocked, hysterical noise between a cry and a laugh choked out.

“What the fuck?” she burst out, staring at him. “What-“

Gold didn’t seem to hear her. With single-minded intent, his jaw tense but his face terrifyingly blank, he drew his cane back again. He smashed the handle into the other headlight in a shower of sparks and broken plastic. Lacey jumped back. Apparently she’d been right all along: this guy did have a dangerous streak, for all his soft, sad eyes.

“The woman your boyfriend is meeting tonight,” Gold was breathing hard, his hair hanging in his face. His hands shook as he leaned heavily on his cane. “Her name is Mila. Mila Gold.”

Lacey stared at him, the pieces falling into place, finally making sense. She couldn’t judge him for the headlights, in retrospect: it was only what she had done. She nodded.

“I didn’t have her name,” she said, weakly. “But yeah, that… her name began with an M. I saw it on his phone.”

Gold nodded. “I’ve met him,” he admitted, stepping back and admiring his handiwork. “He’s been in there every night I’ve come to fetch her.”

“E-every night?” Lacey swallowed around a dry throat. She felt her hands trembling, her stomach rolling. She felt weak, sick, furious; her head was spinning. “They’ve met every Thursday night, for a month?”

“I caught her a month ago,” Gold said. He looked at her for the first time since he’d smashed the headlights. Lacey saw the cold anger in his face shift and soften, apology, guilt and shame returning fast. “I… I don’t know how long it went on before that. I’m sorry, Miss-”

“Lacey,” Lacey croaked out, nodding, a hand coming to cover her mouth. “I’m just… I’m Lacey.”

There was a lump forming in her throat, constricting her windpipe. She wanted to scream, or cry, or maybe march into the bar and drag Killian Jones out by his hair. She wanted to make a scene, to make him hurt and ashamed of himself for his behaviour. But it wouldn’t do any good. If he’d been doing this for over a month, and every time his mistress’ husband had shown up to take her home to their child and yet every week Killian kept coming back regardless, then there was no level of shame that would reach him. She didn’t want to drag him back to her, the way Gold always brought his wife home. She wanted to rip him to shreds with her own two hands. She never wanted to see him again.

The ice that consumed her, cold and purposeful as her eyes landed back on the Jolly Roger, was terrifying. Never in her life had Lacey felt so beaten, so betrayed, so consumed by anger. It was as if all softer emotion – her misery, her self-doubt, even her fear of being caught – had been stripped away. What lay beneath was a cold, hard, ironclad rage, and in that moment Lacey was grateful for it.

She approached Mr Gold, and stood beside him, surveying the car with a critical eye, on hand on her hip. The Jolly Roger was looking the worse for wear, with both sides keyed and ruined and his headlights smashed to smithereens. There was something missing though, something vital.

“He can still drive it,” she said. “Not safely at night without the headlights, but in the morning he could drive it to a garage. This damage is cosmetic.”

“The tyres, then?” Gold suggested. An odd little laugh bubbled in her throat: it was as if they were discussing paperwork, or what to order in a restaurant. It was calm and methodical, like a task or a chore. They were united in its necessity.

She looked up at him, and saw he was offering her a penknife he must have pulled from his pocket. “If you’ll have it?” he asked, his eyebrows rising. “Ladies first.”

Their hands touched when she reached for it, and their eyes met. Lacey stilled, her hand over his, her fingers against his palm.

A shiver ran down her spine.

For just a second, they were the only people in the world, and they shared a kinship, an understanding that went deeper than shared purpose. They were two broken, beaten people driven to extremes, united in having had every better instinct stripped away by a shared betrayal. Whoever they might have been – the yielding, self-sacrificing father who brought his wife home; the quiet, sad girl she’d buried long ago – it didn’t matter now. Those softer qualities had been what allowed Killian to treat her as he had; she suspected Mila had done the same to her husband, preying on his better angels to satisfy her selfish demons.

She wasn’t wrong about him: Lacey was certain of that. Her ability to read people may have been thrown off by Killian’s smooth lies, but she had been right about Gold. He wasn’t psychotic or toxic. He was just like her, abandoned and alone in the dark, and desperately trying to find a way out.

Lacey took the penknife. She found herself smiling a little, as if he’d offered her a rose and not a weapon. “Why, thank you,” she said. His mouth quirked at the corner: the ghost of a smile. For just a moment, his dark eyes were soft and warm.

She strode forward, and knelt on the ground beside the front tyre. Then, running solely off instinct – no book ever having prepared her for how to properly slash a tyre – she rammed the knife home through the thinnest part she could find of the thick rubber. It felt good to stab a real knife deep into the material. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine she was stabbing Killian right though his lying heart. She felt alive, riding a tide of adrenaline and victory, even in just this petty way. “Take that!” she cried, and went to yank the knife back out and go again, to get that cathartic rush a second time.

The knife jammed, refusing to budge. The rubber was far tougher than she had imagined, and she made a little noise of frustration. She tried to wrench it with her hands to get it loose, and for a moment she was terrified she’d ruined the blade.

Lacey breathed a sigh of relief as finally she felt the rubber give, and the knife came free in her hand. There was a wheezing noise, a high, quiet squeal; the air began to release from the tyre. “Try driving away now, bastard,” she muttered. “You can be the one left behind for a change.”

She rose to her feet, and dusted the dirt from the front of her skirt. She tossed her hair with just a little pride as she returned to Mr Gold, and gave him back the knife. “Your turn.”

He inclined his head, eyes gleaming with a touch of mischief. She giggled to see it, which made his severe mouth twitch again. There was another fission down her spine when he took the knife from her, their fingertips just touching. He really was attractive up close, with those dark eyes and that soft hair. He looked so interesting: his face had a map of the world on it, so expressive and yet so guarded. It was so much more appealing than Killian’s slick handsomeness, with his perfectly trimmed beard and his hair gelled and styled meticulously so as to appear as if he’d done neither. There was something organic about Gold, something complicated and rich.

She didn’t know what she was doing, developing a crush on a man she’d only just met, whose only connection to her was that their significant others were fucking. Perhaps it was having shared the experience of wrecking an expensive car. That was the kind of insane thing that brought people together, right?

No matter what it was, she caught herself admiring him again as he strode over to the back right tyre, the diagonal opposite to the one she’d just deflated. “We need only slash two,” he told her, with the voice of a professional. “Towing the car away will be far harder if they can’t rely on either the front or back wheels.”

“Smart,” Lacey agreed, “You’ve, ah, done this before then?”

Gold looked at her over the hood of the car, his eyebrows rising, “I can’t say I have,” he said. “I have, however, had a flat tyre before, and no usable spare.”

“Ah, right,” she nodded, and wrapped her arms around herself, bouncing on the balls of her feet to keep warm. Her tight little dress and thin coat looked amazing, but the nighttime chill was sinking in fast.

She watched him ease himself down next to the back wheel, bracing hard on his cane. His head disappeared behind the back of the car. She saw his arm stab down with the knife, and heard the dull thud of the blade hitting rubber. Gold looked up at her, his face appearing over the Jolly Roger’s trunk. She watched his face twist a little with effort as he jerked down, slashing the tyre with a short, sharp motion. The knife pulled back far easier than it had for her: he’d made a bigger hole, she supposed.

He rose to his feet, and brushed down his impeccable suit, his weight heavy on his cane. He closed the knife, and returned it to his pocket before returning to Lacey.

They stood for a long moment, side by side, looking with a certain macabre pride at the destruction they’d wrought. The Jolly Roger was well and truly vandalised, hundreds of dollars’ worth of damage done. Killian would be distraught.

“He loves this car more than anything in the world,” Lacey said, and couldn’t stop a sharp, mean little laugh escaping her throat. “He’s going to be horrified!”

“There is a certain catharsis in destruction,” Gold admitted, with a sly smile. It set Lacey’s fragile heart racing. “Especially destruction of someone else’s property.”

“Just one more thing,” she said. “Could I… could I borrow that?”

She gestured to his cane. He looked at her curiously for a moment, then stepped back to lean against his Cadillac once more, and held it out to her. “Be careful,” he warned. “I need that.”

“I’ll only be a second,” she promised. She took the cane in both hands. It was heavier than she’d expected, with a good heft. She could understand why he’d used the handle for the headlights, since it had to be solid metal and was easily the heaviest part of the cane. She held it by the lower end, and gave a couple of practice swings to get a feel for it.

She strode around to the side of the Jolly Roger, and swung the cane as hard as she could into the windscreen. The glass broke and splintered with a satisfying noise, the cracks spreading out from the centre like a spider’s web. She swung again, and again, smashing the glass in so it shattered across the inside. She heard herself begin to laugh, hard and cruel but free. She had never felt so powerful in her life.

She was breathing hard when she finally stopped, and stepped back, the cane shaking in her grasp. “Thanks,” she breathed, surveying the impressive damage. The car looked wrecked, totalled, ruined. It finally looked the way she felt.

“Better?” he asked, dryly. She nodded, swallowing hard and catching her breath. Her heart was going a mile a minute, and she never wanted to slow down.

“Yes,” she said, firmly. She handed the cane back, and he took it with a small, indulgent smile. “You’re right,” she said. “Destruction is cathartic as fuck.”

“Even better when one isn’t responsible for the clean-up.”

“They could come outside any time,” Lacey replied, her voice breathless with fear and something else, excitement that didn’t bear scrutiny. “We should get out of here.”

“We?” Gold blinked at her. She hoped he just didn’t understand her, that this wasn’t his way of ending their association when it had only just begun. She didn’t want it to end.

“I… I mean, if you want to?” she said, hesitantly. “I have to drive back to Boston but I thought… I mean, there’s an all-night diner on the way? We could get coffee?”

He looked down at his hands, trembling on the handle of his cane. He looked at the station wagon across the parking lot. “No doubt my wife can give your boyfriend any lift he may need,” he muttered. “And I can’t say the prospect of returning home without her appeals in the slightest.”

“Will your son miss you?” she asked. He shook his head.

“A neighbour, the father of one of my son’s friends, took him for the night. We always fight, when I bring her home. I wanted to spare him for once, if I could help it.”

“Then… do you wanna grab a crappy cup of coffee?” Lacey asked. She desperately didn’t want to drive home yet, to that empty apartment that reeked of Killian’s cheap cologne, to her stuff jumbled up with his, her whole life covered in him. She didn’t want to face whatever he might do, when he found out what she’d done.

She looked up at Gold, pleading with him silently to say yes, to not leave her all alone… not now, not just yet. It felt like he was all she had in the world.

“Alright,” Gold said, at last. “I’ll follow you. Just one last thing,” he approached the Jolly Roger again, and Lacey wondered what there was possibly left to do to mangle the car. She waited for him to hoist up his cane, and slam the handle into the bonnet or the roof, or perhaps destroy the wing mirrors.

What he did instead was somehow far worse. She watched as Mr Gold, as coolly as if he were paying at the supermarket, pulled a roll of bills from his inside breast pocket. She watched him count out the amount he wanted, and then lift the lower windscreen wiper, tucking the money securely beneath.

“There,” he said, with a satisfied smile. “Now he can’t come for reparations.”

Lacey gaped at him: somehow, the negligent payment for the damage was far more insulting than the damage itself.

“A great deal of pride rests in one’s ability to support oneself,” Gold explained, his nonchalance belied entirely by his shaking hands and the intensity in his eyes. “And pride, as you likely know better than most, is a hard thing to repair once someone has taken it from you.”

Lacey nodded, swallowing hard around an uncomfortable knot in her gut. It seemed so much crueller, somehow, than simple destruction. It cut closer to the heart of what he’d done to them both. Lacey didn’t know how she felt – she felt everything, and all at once. It was a masterstroke: that much she knew. “It’ll eat him alive.”

“Good,” Gold said, fiercely. “He deserves it. I hope it… I hope it goes some way toward your catharsis too.”

“It does,” Lacey agreed, a little touched he seemed to care. At least the odd sense of connection seemed to go both ways. “It wouldn’t humiliate him if I paid for the damage. He’s used to taking my money. But his masculinity is fragile enough that his mistress’ husband bankrolling him will definitely leave a mark.”

“I thought as much,” Gold nodded. “That sounds like Mila’s type.”

“I’ll buy the coffee, though,” Lacey added. “It’s only fair.”

He almost managed a smile. She thought that if he ever smiled properly, with true warmth or laughter, it would be transformative. She wanted to see that. “Lead on,” he gestured to her car. She nodded.

When she glanced into her mirror as she pulled out of the parking lot, she saw Gold waiting just behind her, waiting to follow, just as she’d said. The wrecked Jolly Roger sat off to the side. She pulled back out toward the freeway without another backward glance.


	2. Pause

Gold’s heart was hammering in his chest as he followed the young woman he’d just met – Lacey – out onto the open road.

Now that the adrenaline of truly desecrating Killian Jones’ perfect car had worn off, the old anxieties, the terror of Mila’s disapproval and of the hell that could rain down on his head, reared its ugly head. Anger was a powerful drug.

Leaving the money was foolishness itself. It was the final nail in the coffin, the calling card that, while it would hurt Jones, was truly aimed at Mila. It was a way of reminding her why she’d married him at all: because he had the funds, and then some, to pay for anything he damn well pleased.

At least they’d left no real evidence. After weeks of walking in and out of that blasted bar, he knew there was no security camera outside. Why would there be? There were all of five hundred people in Longbourne, and the Sheriff likely knew them all by name. He had no doubt the clandestine lovers had chosen it as their rendezvous point specifically because it was remote – even if, in the end, everyone they’d hidden from had found them anyway.

Still, Mila would know he was responsible. Mila would know, and his outburst would be all the ammunition she needed to divorce him and take Bae with her when she left. A criminal record would make her case for his being an unfit parent open and shut.

They couldn’t prove it. The only witness was just as guilty as he was. No one had gotten hurt.

He repeated it like a mantra, over and over again in his mind. No proof; no witness; no victim. Perhaps Jones would be so humiliated by the event he wouldn’t even press charges. Perhaps Lacey would happily own to all the charges, and refuse to implicate him. Perhaps they could be each another’s alibi.

That would require her to want anything to do with him after tonight. Fat chance of that, he thought bitterly, once the adrenaline wore off and she realised what he was, and what they’d done.

No woman in her right man would respect a man who had done what he did. Not the wanton destruction, since she’d initiated that, but the cowardice of what had come before. He had trudged into that bar every week to beg his wife to come home, allowed her to betray him and their marital vows and humiliate him in exchange for living under the same roof. What sort of a coward was so afraid of his own wife?

Gold glanced up at the mirror, and caught a glimpse of his own eyes looking back. The same kind who didn’t notice when his son slipped from his sight for a minute, and managed to drink nail polish remover. The same kind who ended up cradling his child in the back of an ambulance, praying to God that his carelessness wouldn’t cost him the only thing in the world that truly mattered.

Mila had been right about that, at least. What had happened to Bae, the tragedy they’d skirted just months ago, had been entirely his fault.

Bae’s face flashed through his mind, so small and helpless in that hospital bed. Gold had slept a long, restless night on the cot at Bae’s side, waking with a start at every small noise, unable to relax for even a moment. Finally, in the wee small hours, Bae’s huge eyes had blinked open, awake at last. Gold had hugged him close, sobbed his relief into his small son’s hair, and sworn never to let him go ever again.

But when Bae had looked around that hospital room, he had seen only his father. Mila didn’t return for another week. Gold still didn’t know where she had gone, and he was too afraid to ask.

The taillights of Lacey’s little car winked ahead of him, constant and steady as the stars above. He followed as he’d promised. His thoughts narrowed, shying away from fear, from doubt, from the cloud of miserable possibilities that lay ahead. All he saw was the road, and those blinking lights. He followed them like a will-o-the-wisp, like a lighthouse in the fog. They felt, for just those long, dark moments on that long, dark road, like guiding stars.

Time and space lost their meaning. For minutes or hours he drove through the dark, until those lights became the world, swallowed it whole.

He blinked, returning to himself as she turned on the indicator, and those red and white splashes gained a daub of flashing yellow. He turned off with her, into the parking lot of a roadside all-night diner. He’d never noticed it before, but he could have driven by it a hundred times.

Lacey was already out of her car and waiting by the time Gold parked up. The red, white and yellow lights of the diner interior and the neon sign outside gave her messy curls an odd kind of halo.

He’d been half in love with her from the moment he first saw her.

It was an odd thing, quick and sharp. He’d barely noticed he wasn’t alone, when he’d gotten miserably out of his car and gone toward the bar. It was routine, a scheduled humiliation: his allotted hours spent in purgatory. He never felt so crushingly alone as on those nights when he dragged his wife away from her boyfriend, and home to their son and their cold bed.

It had been the sudden knowledge of another person, those bright blue eyes watching him with curious sympathy, which had given him that fatal pause. She had been chewing her lip, her key in her hand, and when he looked at her he found her bright, flushed and a little wild.

She had made a different choice, a braver choice. She had taken her fate in her own hands, rather than doing as he ever had and placing it in the hands of another, someone bound to abuse it. She had refused to bow, or scrape, or beg for approval any longer. She had made herself brave, despite being small, and a little broken, and stepped on by the man she loved. She had pulled herself up from the ground, put steel in her spine and taken back what was hers.

She was just as beautiful now, her arms folded protectively over her slim torso, bouncing nervously on the balls of her feet, as she had been then. He wondered if tonight was as wild and unthinkable for her as it felt for him.

“I make no promises of quality,” she warned him, as he got out of his car and went to join her. “I just saw this place on the drive down, while I was trying to get up the courage to confront him. I thought about just stopping here and going home.”

“You still could,” he said, and then winced. He just wanted to know if she felt the same as he did, as unable and unwilling to return to real life and let go of her and the strange connection that seemed to exist between them. It came out like a dismissal. He was doing this all wrong.

Was there a way to get this right? How could anyone possibly do right by the woman whose boyfriend was sleeping with his wife? Was there even room for anything good to come of such inauspicious beginnings?

Maybe this wasn’t worth getting right. Maybe it was just an empty space, a meaningless connection born of loneliness, and pining for something that had been missing since well before tonight. He didn’t know if it mattered either way.

“I don’t wanna go home yet,” she said, her soft voice begging him to understand. “There’s nothing left for me there, just bad memories. I just need to hide out for a little while.”

He nodded: he understood all too well.

Let’s get you some coffee, then,” he said. Her whole face lit up, brighter than the neon signs and the car headlights passing on the highway.

She led him inside, and they took a seat in a booth by the window. There were only two other patrons – midnight on a Thursday was not a popular hour, it seemed – and a waitress at the bar. No one paid them any mind. An oldies station played on the radio, a song Gold vaguely recognised ringing through tinny old speakers.

_Oh, we could be heroes! Just for one day..._

He listened to the music to keep from noticing the heavy silence that hung over their booth. Now that they were here, sitting opposite one another in this all-but-silent diner, the connection from before fell away into awkward silence. He didn’t know what to say to her. What was there to say?

“So… you said you’re from Boston?” Gold spoke just to break the silence. Lacey shrugged. She fiddled with her menu, her eyes downcast, away from his.

“I live there,” she said. “I’m obviously not from there.”

“Where is home, then?” he pressed, desperate to speak, to bring her back to life. She appeared to have curled up in on herself, exposed now in the fluorescent lighting, as if the darkness had hidden things that the harsh light disclosed.

“Melbourne,” she said, “Australia. Long, long way from here.”

“Yes,” he said. “Further even than Scotland. But it’s at least warm there, I believe?”

She snorted at that; he was delighted to see just the hints of a smile. She really was stunningly beautiful. He had to wonder, traitorously, why any man would stray when he had this creature waiting for him at home. Mila was beautiful too, in her own strong, strident sort of way. But there was something else beneath Lacey’s skin, something that shone out uncontrollably, that drew him closer, that made him long to gaze at her and breathe her in. Her beauty was not merely physical: it ran deeper than that. He had the oddest thought that she seemed to be trying to hide it, although he couldn’t fathom why.

He knew nothing about her. He longed to know everything. And he’d regret that odd romanticism in the morning, when the sun rose and she was gone, and he realised what a mistake it was to trust emotions evoked in the dead of night.

“This is so weird,” she muttered, but she was smiling a little at least. She looked up at him, as if seeking validation. “Like, we straight-up committed a crime tonight, right? What the fuck?”

“It was hideously stupid,” he said. “Not to mention rash and impulsive.”

“But it felt good, didn’t it?” she pressed. He inclined his head, unable to deny that. He felt himself smile just a little. It had felt very, very good.

“That it did.”

“And he deserved it,” Lacey added, stronger for having him still on her side. “I mean he’s been sleeping with your wife, helping her hurt you over, and over again. That’s bad enough, but then he’s also been cheating on me, possibly for months, and he made me sound so paranoid whenever I asked for the truth.”

“I can’t understand why,” Gold muttered. “Bastard must be blind to think he can do better than you.”

He didn’t know why he said it: the adrenaline and strangeness of the situation must have loosened his tongue. He glanced up, hoping she wasn’t insulted or discomforted by his roundabout compliment. He was stunned to see her cheeks blooming, and the very tips of her ears, revealed by her messy ponytail, blushing a bright pink.

“I’m a total mess, you know.” Lacey shook her head, looking away from him again. “I’m a human toxic waste site.”

“I find that exceedingly hard to believe,” he told her, hating how earnest he sounded. “Given what I’ve seen of you thus far, at least. Anyone can be driven to extremes with enough provocation.”

She snorted through her nose, and buried her head in her hands. “God,” she groaned. “This is so screwed up, isn’t it?”

“Do you believe that’s your fault?” he asked, curiously. “You sound like someone blaming themselves.”

“I think it was already fucked when you and I got there,” Lacey shrugged, and he wondered how much of that answer she’d thought about already on the drive over. “Maybe we just tipped it over the edge?”

“Perhaps,” he agreed. It was comforting, if not entirely convincing, to think of himself as somehow the victim here and not the miserable perpetrator. After all, he’d driven Mila away with his weakness, trapped her with his guilt, and now he’d trashed her boyfriend’s car out of pure anger and desperation. What woman wouldn’t seek an alternative to that? He could hardly blame her for his faults.

“Do you blame yourself?” she asked, turning his question about on him. He didn’t meet her eyes, keeping them instead on the plastic menu before him.

“Mila’s made it abundantly clear whose fault our marriage is,” he muttered, at last. “She’s the victim here. I’m sure that opinion won’t be changed by our little felony.”

“She’s cheating,” Lacey replied, firmly. He was stunned to feel her soft hand cover his on the table, lowering his menu, causing him to look up and meet her bright blue eyes. “And she knows how it hurts you, and how the fighting must hurt your kid, but she doesn’t stop. That’s not sounding like a victim to me, Mr Gold. That’s sounding like someone too selfish to put her family first, and not kind or strong enough just to make a clean break. Tonight aside, nothing you’ve said has convinced me you’re to blame here. Trust me, I know all about cheating assholes shifting the blame.”

He looked at her carefully, and remembered her words from before. She’d told him how Jones had twisted her self-perception, isolated her, turned her on her friends. The thought of that sneering, bullying, cruel man inflicting his torments on someone as warm and bright as Lacey made Gold’s blood run cold. Perhaps Killian and Mila deserved one another. Perhaps it was high time he let her make her own bad decisions.

Perhaps even Bae was better off without her.

He looked up to see the waitress approaching, looking about as bored and tired as he felt excited and awake. When was the last time he’d felt excitement? When was the last time anything had cut through the clouds of desperation and fear in his head and sparked anything that still felt alive?

“Two coffees?” Lacey requested, with a quick glance to Gold. He nodded.

“Black for me, please,” he added. Lacey grinned.

“Me too,” she agreed. “So two black coffees.”

The waitress nodded, and jotted it down. She took the menus. Gold missed the visual distraction from the beautiful, impossible woman sat across from him. He couldn’t trust anything he was feeling right then, especially not the odd, thrumming electricity between them. She wasn’t the sort of person people like him were supposed to know. But then, this wasn’t the sort of night men like him were supposed to have.

They were left alone again, without even the distraction of their menus to hide behind. Her bright eyes struck him at point blank range.

“Can I ask you something?”

He nodded. All the confidence of before, the anger and the cold vengeance, the parts of him he neither liked nor trusted but relied upon nevertheless, had deserted him. He was left the trembling, nervous man Mila would recognise, the man too spineless to do anything but beg his cruel wife to keep coming home to him.

“You said before… you said you’d destroyed worse than keying a car. What did you do?”

He couldn’t decipher the tone of her voice or expression, caught somewhere between horrified fascination and genuine sympathy. There was something else there too, something desperate beneath it all that craved vindication and even affinity.

“Our son was very sick,” he explained, fiddling with the corner of his napkin, pleading with her silently to understand, to not judge his weakness for what it was. “She blamed me, and she was right to. It was a nasty fight we had that night. She vanished, and I took my frustrations out on half my shop’s inventory. It took me three days to clean up the damage done in three minutes.”

“Oh god, I’m so sorry. Is he okay now?” she asked, concern flooding her voice. Whatever hardness she’d possessed, whatever violent fascination, melted away like new snow. It was as if all her edges softened, leaving a very different woman in her wake, her eyes full of kindness. Her hand covered his on the table, and warmed him through. His skin sparked and burned where her soft skin touched his.

“He made a full recovery,” he confirmed, his face soft with relief, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “He’s just fine now: children are resilient, you know. But at the time… there was no guarantee the treatment would take.”

“I’m glad he’s alright,” Lacey said, sincerely. “What’s his name?”

“Bae, short for Baden.” Gold smiled, unable to stop himself at the thought of his son. He fumbled in his coat pocket, and pulled out his wallet, and from that the crumpled picture he carried everywhere. It was taken just a few months back, on Bae’s first day of first grade. He was beaming at the camera, his messy dark curls almost under control, his teeth full of gaps.

Lacey’s eyebrows creased, her whole face lightening and softening as she smiled. “He’s adorable,” she murmured, her fingertips lightly touching the photograph. “How old is he?”

“Almost six,” Gold told her. “Five and three-quarters, he’d want me to tell you.”

Lacey laughed at that. She sobered a moment later, and her fingers moved from the photograph to gently cover his hand. “How long ago did he get sick?“ she asked, then. Gold’s whole mood dampened.

“Three months,” Gold said.

“And how the hell did she blame you?” Lacey asked, a flash of her former spirit returning. She was a fascinating contradiction: hard and soft by turns, constantly in flux between a sunlit meadow and a forest fire.

“I was watching him,” Gold said. He remembered the events of that terrible day as if they’d happened hours ago. He explained them now as he had explained to the paramedic, and the doctor, and Bae’s teacher. “Mila works full time, so I do most of the childcare and work from home. I was supposed to watch him, but I had to call a tenant over a missed rent payment, and I lost track of Bae for a few minutes. Mila had been in a hurry that morning, so she’d done her nails downstairs. The remover was brightly coloured, and it reminded Bae of his mama. When I found him…” he closed his eyes, swallowing down his sickness at the sharp, clear image of his poor little boy, curled on the ground staring at the wall, his eyes glazed and stomach hurting. “When I found him, he was on the ground. I don’t know how much he drank,” he said, his voice strained. “He knew Mila used it a lot, it smelled like her, he- he wanted to be like his mama. I had to call an ambulance, and then they had to pump his stomach and give him some sort of fluids, I don’t know much else. I don’t remember much else, honestly.”

The details of what had come after, the hospital and the doctors, his child in pain, were indistinct. He only remembered how helpless he’d felt, how terrified his carelessness had killed his son. The next thing he really remembered was Mila’s face, contorted with hatred and disgust, screaming at him in the parking lot. That he remembered clear as day.

“She blames you for that?” Lacey shook her head in disbelief, and clenched his hand hard.

“I should have been watching him,” Gold snapped. “I am to blame.”

“Kids eat things!” Lacey exclaimed. “Hell, I grew up in a florist shop, do you know how many flowers can poison a child? What in God’s name was she doing leaving her nail varnish remover where your son could get it? It’s any parent’s job to make sure you put literal poison on a high shelf, that shit is toxic!”

“I should have moved it.” Gold shook his head, “I should have been watching him.”

“You found him,” she said. “And you got him to the hospital, right? And he’s okay now?”

“He’s just fine,” Gold said. “Remarkably.”

“Then it was an accident,” Lacey said, firmly. “They happen. Nobody’s perfect.”

“Mila didn’t see it that way,” Gold said. “I didn’t see her for a week after. I’ve still no idea where she went.”

“Wait… a week?” Lacey clarified. Her voice had gone a little high and strained. “Around three months ago?”

Gold nodded, slowly. “We screamed at each other in the hospital parking lot,” he told her. “We were both terrified we were going to lose him. Mila got in her car and drove off. I went to fetch an overnight bag, and ended up destroying half my shop.”

“I get that,” Lacey nodded. It was her turn to withdraw, to fiddle, to not meet his eyes. He missed the comfort of her touch, grounding and warming him. “It’s just… around three months ago, I thought Killian was going to leave me,” she said, softly. “Things hadn’t been right for a while, we both knew it. We’d scream and throw things, then he’d call me his love, and I’d apologise for being a difficult, high maintenance mess, and we’d fuck and make up. It was exhausting, but it felt inevitable, you know? Like that’s what love is supposed to be, all explosive and painful and intense. Then one night, he called me from the road and said he needed time to think. I didn’t see or hear for him for around- around a week.”

Gold swallowed hard, digesting her meaning. The thought that Mila’s affair could have begun the night of their son’s poisoning, that maybe she had been finding comfort with another man, with Killian Jones, while Bae could have died… his stomach rolled. He thought he was going to be sick.

“It’s probably a coincidence,” she murmured, chancing a glance up at him, her huge blue eyes drowning. He nodded.

“Probably.”

They both knew it wasn’t.

The silence stretched between them, miserable and uncomfortable but not awkward, not difficult. It was a companionable misery, each lost in their own thoughts. Gold looked out of the window. They were in the middle of nowhere: aside from the diner signs and the streetlights, all that greeted him was dark, empty fields, rolling over the horizon. The occasional car passed, but didn’t stop. He tried to focus on the neon lights, the car headlights, even the darkness of the treeline: anything to keep from seeing the haggard face looking back at him, with hollow eyes and a trembling mouth.

The clatter of two cheap white cups of coffee arriving jolted them both, and Gold heard Lacey thank the waitress absently, on instinct. “Sorry,” Lacey apologised. “I must have zoned out for a moment there.”

“Easily done,” he replied. He took a sip of the coffee: it was hot and strong, a shock to the system. Gold was thankful for it, the warmth filling his belly, the bitterness rolling over his tongue. Any distraction from reality was welcome here.

“Do you want to know something awful?” Lacey asked. Gold tipped his head to one side, and gestured her to continue. “I really hope he’s heartbroken, when he sees his car.”

“Better that than regretting what’s already been done,” Gold shrugged. “You’ve no reason, based on what you’ve said, to wish him well. I can’t say that I do.”

“I want to be the sort of person who doesn’t regret it,” Lacey admitted. “I want to be like that, I want to be that girl, you know? Who’s just careless and vicious and doesn’t give a fuck. Hard as nails.” She sighed, and ran a hand through her messy hair, tightening her ponytail. “I’m still trying to be Lacey,” she muttered, shaking her head. “And I keep coming up short. He’s hurt me in every way it’s possible to hurt someone aside from actual physical violence. He’s taken everything I have, and still I- I feel kind of bad we wrecked his car. It still feels wrong.”

“You have a conscience,” Gold said. “It’s not a bad thing. Many would be far better off for a conscience capable of speaking above their baser instincts.”

“My conscience hasn’t had much to say of late,” she said. “It doesn’t say anything when I drink too much, or let my shitty boyfriend cut me off from my friends. It doesn’t speak up when I act out to provoke a fight, try to make him jealous or some shit just to get a reaction out of Killian. And yet now, when I actually do something…”

“It’s one thing to hurt yourself,” Gold said. “Self-destruction doesn’t feel the same as hurting someone else. We’re not hardwired to feel empathy for ourselves.”

“I wasn’t always like this,” Lacey told him. “I- but then, I wouldn’t be here if- and Killian would never even have looked at me-“

Gold frowned, regarding her closely. She was deteriorating before his eyes; he could all but see pieces of her falling away, confusion and misery sending her into a tailspin. There was something he was missing, some piece of her that made the rest make sense. He thought back to what she’d said before. It felt so much easier to focus on her, to help her, than it did to help himself.

“You said, just now, you said you were trying to be ‘Lacey’?”

She stopped in her tracks, staring at him. Her mouth parted, as if to speak, then closed again. She took a breath, and released it slowly. She looked as if she were about to bolt, fingers shaking, her eyes glancing for the door. She took a sip of her coffee. He watched every little action with fascination, trying to read her thoughts through her displacements. He watched as she sank back, as if she’d lost some internal war. Her fingers curled around her coffee cup; her eyes rested on its contents.

“I wasn’t always like this,” she said again, at last. She closed her mouth again, pursed her lips. Whatever she was about to say, she swallowed it back before she could.

“Then what were you before?”

He regretted the question: it made her crumble, shrink and become vulnerable before his eyes. It was just a moment, and then he watched her rally, straighten, put that steel back into her spine. She was remarkable, the strength of her.

“If I tell you, will you tell me a secret in return?” she asked, bold as brass.

Gold paused, considered his position. In the quiet florescence of that diner, with this woman he felt he knew so well and yet had barely met, he felt limitless, outside of time and space, outside of shame or consequence. He’d already told her about Bae’s poisoning, and Mila’s infidelity. They already knew and had avenged one another’s humiliations. She seemed like she wanted to tell him, however reluctantly, and goddamn did he want to know. He wanted to know everything about her, everything she would tell him. They’d gone from strangers to partners-in-crime in a single bound, and just for tonight, just for now, that seemed to mean something.

“Deal,” he said: a magic word.

Lacey nodded. “Okay,” she murmured, more to herself than to him. She took a deep breath, exhaled, “Okay…” Her hand reached up to play with the necklace at her throat, spinning the little pearl on its golden chain around and around, twirling it between her fingertips. “So three years ago, my mother died, and I lost myself. I’d just graduated college, so I moved home to be with my father. I thought that was the best way to grieve, you know? To be with family?”

“The logic follows,” Gold said, although he couldn’t imagine ever willingly returning to his own father for any sort of comfort.

“I couldn’t think of being anywhere else,” she sighed. “Everything I was then, I’d learned from my mum. She was the one who made me love books, made me want to travel; she taught me to read herself, when I was only four. Her flower shop was my favourite place in the world. I couldn’t breathe without her.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Gold said: a meaningless platitude, but he didn’t know what else to say. It was his turn to take her hand, to squeeze it. she squeezed back, gratefully.

“I thought my dad needed me to keep an eye on him,” she continued. “But instead, he pressured me into a relationship with a guy I went to high school with. I think what papa really wanted was to to see me taken care of. He worried what would become of me, once he was gone too, after seeing how hard I took mama’s death. I went along with it because I was in pain, and I didn’t really want to be alone with that, you know? But George wasn’t… we weren’t happy. He was an okay guy but he was so superficial, he wasn’t interested in anything but his bicep size, honestly. But he still proposed, because he had this whole idea of who and what we were supposed to be, who I was supposed to be. His little Belle.”

She spat the final words, as if they tasted bad in her mouth. He stared at her, and felt the final piece of the puzzle slide into place.

“Belle?”

Her head shot up, as if on instinct. A laugh, high and slightly hysterical, burst from her throat. “God, sorry, only my dad still calls me that,” she said. “And I don’t speak to him much anymore. Not since I said no to George, anyway. That’s why I came to the US, actually. I already had a college friend here who could set me up with a job, and I had this whole idea of starting a brand new life – new name, new country, new everything. No more Little Belle.”

“Trying to be ‘Lacey’,” he surmised. She nodded.

“I had this great idea of who Lacey would be,” she said. Her small hands cradled her coffee, thumbs playing around the rim. “I thought she’d be tough, and smart, and take no one’s shit. I figured I could do everything my dad and George would hate, I could drink and stay out all night, sleep with whomever I wanted, and I could refuse to give a fuck about anyone or anything else. I thought that was who I really was, you know? Adventurous, rebellious, wild, because all that bookish, nerdy good-girl shit I’d been before must have just been to make my dad happy, right? So I just stripped it all away. No more books, no more plans to be a librarian or a writer, no more ambition, no more school. Just drinking, sleeping, and enough work to pay the bills.”

“And how’d that work out?” Gold asked, snorting at the thought. He’d known her all of a few hours, and already he knew that the woman sitting across from him was a million miles from the apparent ideal she described. She shrugged.

“Some days, it’s amazing,” she said, wistfully. “Especially in those early days. It was such a release, you know? To be free of all those expectations, all that pressure to be the perfect daughter, the perfect girlfriend. But it seems like everything else in my life: nothing I plan ever works out like I hope. No matter what I want, what I do, who I trust… I end up back where I started.”

“It can be that way sometimes,” Gold replied, softly. “There’s an allure to darkness, it’s true. It offers strength, control, even power. But it rarely makes us happy. Perhaps you’re hoping for the wrong things?” He tilted his head to the side, “Or trusting the wrong people?”

“I met Killian in a club, just over a year ago,” she said. “We’ve been together ever since, even lived together for the past eight months. I definitely shouldn’t have trusted him.” She sighed, and blew a loose strand of her hair out of her face. “So, you want to know the secret part?” she asked. He raised an eyebrow.

“That wasn’t the secret?”

She shook her head. “No, the secret is… the secret is that some days, I really, really miss being Belle. I miss studying, I miss having friends who didn’t just drink all the time, I miss my books… but Belle was weak, and boring, and conventional. When I became Lacey, I found the balls to move halfway across the world, and make a whole new life for myself.” She snorted a little giggle, with a genuine smile that lit her beautiful face. “I trashed my cheating boyfriend’s car tonight,” she said. “Belle would never, ever have done that.”

“We don’t change our skins so easily as you may think,” Gold said. She looked at him with narrowed, speculative eyes, waiting for an explanation. “You didn’t suddenly become a new person when you changed your name; it doesn’t work that way. However much we may wish otherwise, we are always only who and what we are.”

“So you don’t believe people can change?” she asked. He considered the question.

“I believe it’s a gradual process,” he said, at last. “Everything we do, defines who we are. We have to live with our choices; we wear them like a cloak for all our days. So, you are still whoever you were before your mother’s death. And you are the same woman who moved to the States, and the same woman who destroyed Killian Jones’ car, with great style I might add.” He winked, and surprised a laugh out of her. It felt like a great accomplishment to make this woman, whoever she was, smile.

“And you are the same man who smashed his shop, and stayed by his son’s bedside, and begged his wife to come home every week for a month,” she said. He inclined his head, trying to keep calm while his hands trembled. It sounded so weak, so cowardly, when phrased that way. “And the same man who was right there with me, beating the hell out of that piece of shit car.”

She raised her half-empty coffee mug, and he clinked his together with hers. She laughed again: he had the feeling that when she relaxed, she was the sort of person who smiled a lot. It made her even more beautiful, if that were possible.

“Now,” she said, with a little sigh. “I believe you owe me a secret in return.”

He nodded, “Indeed I do.”

“Hmmm,” she pursed her lips, and tapped her chin with one chipped fingernail. Everything about her – the tight clothes, the messy bun, the heavy make up and the chipped nail varnish – screamed vapid party girl. It was a costume, he thought: a mask. She had admitted as much. When he looked into her eyes, he saw such a depth of intelligence and understanding there, as if there were someone else, perhaps the mysterious Belle, desperately trying to emerge. “Okay,” she said at last. “What’s your name?”

“I already told you that,” he replied, brow furrowing. “It’s Mr Gold.”

“No one’s first name is ‘Mister’,” she chided. “Unless you’re secretly a Batman villain, I guess. I meant your first name.”

“Oh,” he blinked at her: he’d gotten so used to being referred to as ‘Gold’, only Mila ever called him by his forename. And it always sounded so awful in her voice, spat out and covered in spite. “Elias,” he said. “Elias Gold. But that’s a matter of public record: it’s hardly a secret.”

“Hmm,” she pursed her lips, half-smiling, considering him. “Do you prefer Eli?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. No one in his life had ever shortened his given name. No one, not even his wife, had ever felt so familiar. He was a formal man by nature, stiff and old-fashioned – he was not, nor had he ever been, the kind to have a nickname. He liked that name in her voice, though. She caressed it, her lovely alto accent rolling over the syllables. He could get used to that.

“I think I do, yes,” he said, at last. She smiled, and he felt himself fall a just little bit deeper in love with her.

“Could you do me a favour, Eli?” she asked, then. Her voice, so perceptive and strong just moments ago, quietened again, turned hesitant and vulnerable.

He nodded, instinctively. Only once he had, did he wonder why he wasn’t asking for his own price. That was what he did, wasn’t it? Bartered, bargained, traded for what he needed. Even his own wife he haggled with on a daily basis, offering anything he had to give in return for her continued presence.

“Could you… could you call me Belle?” she asked, as if she were unsure herself of her request. Gold’s breath caught. It felt like she was entrusting him with an awful lot more than just her name.

“I would be honoured,” he said.

She reached behind the back of her head, and he watched as she undid her hairstyle, pulling the band loose. Her soft dark hair fell in long waves, past her shoulders. She fanned it out with her fingers, working out the worst of the knots and kinks. “I never used to wear my hair up,” she explained. “Now I do it all the time.”

“It suits you,” he replied, his mouth moving of its own accord as his eyes drank her in. She was looking at him expectantly, gauging his reaction. “Wearing your hair down, I mean,” he clarified. “It’s – you’re lovely, Belle.”

To his delight, she blushed again, her soft cheeks turning rosy and warm. He imagined – although he could no longer see them – that the tips of her ears had pinked again too.

“I think I miss being Belle,” she confided. She was beginning to smile more, an infectious, hopeful, excited sort of smile. “I might try it again, sometime.”

“What would that mean?” he asked, trying to mask his hunger for details of her behind his clumsy attempts to help. “To be Belle again, I mean?”

“That’s what I don’t know,” she admitted, slumping back a little in her chair. She looked out of the window for a long moment, and he watched her take in her own reflection, her hand reflexively tugging at her hair, repositioning this curl or that strand. “I think it has to be over between Killian and me, to start with,” she said. She looked back at him, “I mean, that’s true no matter what I’m calling myself.”

“I think what we did to his car more than promises that,” Gold replied. Belle giggled, a shocked noise, as if she’d just remembered what they’d done.

“God, that’s a mess,” she shook her head. “Fuck me, that’s a mess.”

Gold left that turn of phrase aside. It certainly wasn’t an invitation.

“I think…” she continued, her bright mind whirring even as she spoke, “I think it’d mean I’d have to get my shit together, right? Make completely annihilating the Jolly Roger Lacey’s last act? Begin again? That’s what my friend Mulan would say. She’s been worried about me for months, after what happened with Rory.”

“I’m no more an authority on such things as anyone else,” Gold replied, regretting he didn’t have wisdom to offer, some piece of guidance that would make everything better. Perhaps that was how she saw him: a guide, some paternal figure who could help her through the wilderness. If that were the case, he thought, then he should probably keep himself from being caught up again by the softness of her mouth as she spoke, or the beauty of her aquamarine eyes. Or, for that matter, how wonderfully distracting her plunging neckline was.

“I guess not,” she said. She sighed, and glanced out of the window again, catching another glimpse of her reflection looking back.

Gold finished his coffee.


	3. Breathe

Belle’s cup was empty.

That was a problem: it meant she had to make another choice. Decisions were making her head spin tonight, too many and too fast, and every one of them carried the weight of the world.

She looked across the table at Eli. His deep dark eyes looked back at her, the same question reflected there that she grappled with.

What did they do now? What happened next? What would _Belle_ do next, in this situation?

He moved first, made the decision for them both. He pushed his coffee cup away from him, and sat back. “It’s getting late,” he said. Belle nodded. 

“I… thank you, Eli,” she said. “For everything.”

“I should be thanking you,” he said, with a crooked smile she was coming to adore. She’d known him only a few hours, but she felt she’d miss him like a limb when he was gone. “Can I walk you to your car?”

She nodded. She loved how much of a gentleman he was, how thoughtful, how considerate. She loved how when he looked at her, she felt like she was the only thing in the world that existed for him. She felt as if he knew her better than anyone she’d ever met, but that was absurd: he’d known her five minutes.

Belle felt as if she stood on a fault line. The world held its breath as she decided which way to fall.

He opened the door for her as she shrugged on her coat, and she had a moment where she thought he’d offer her his arm, like a real gentleman. She stepped back outside, the cool night air sending gooseflesh racing over her arms and bare legs.

Their cars were only steps away. He stopped, dawdled. She thought maybe he didn’t want this to end either, didn’t want to go back to his life any more than she wanted to go back to hers. 

She looked up at him. He really was beautiful, with his careworn lines, those rich dark eyes full of understanding and warmth, and his soft hair playing in the breeze. He looked like he was about to say something – goodbye, perhaps – and she couldn’t take another moment of it.

Lacey had been attracted to him since he smashed the Jolly Roger’s headlights. But Belle had fallen half in love with him the moment he’d said her name. 

“You’re really very brave, you know,” she said, the words coming in a rush before he could speak. “What you were going to do at the bar, I mean,” she clarified. “Going in every week to get her, even though it killed you to do it, even though she didn’t care what it did to you. You’re so brave to do that for your child, especially when it hurt you so much.” 

“A brave man would have walked away,” he disagreed, his shoulders dropping low, eyes slipping away from hers. “I’m just the town coward.” 

Belle looked up at him, at a loss for what to say. What had that woman done to him, to make him this way? There was such a good heart in his chest, and yet he was so certain it didn’t matter. In that moment, Belle hated Mila Gold far more than she did Killian Jones.

That was a Belle feeling, wasn’t it: that instinct toward empathy, putting someone else first? Lacey was wonderfully, liberally selfish, but it meant she was useless in the face of someone else’s pain. It was wonderfully freeing now, to let herself be Belle again, after all this time. Maybe he was right, maybe she could be both, with Lacey’s spine and Belle’s heart. 

“You’re not that, Eli,” she said, her hand coming to cup his cheek, to turn him gently to face her. “You’re anything but a coward. Please know that.”

He didn’t reply. His eyes were locked on hers, and she saw him trying oh so very hard to believe her, to fight his impulse toward self-loathing – Mila’s voice in his head, she had no doubt – and trust that she was right. 

“You’re amazing, Belle,” he replied, at last, his voice a soft exhale. It was wrong to say these things, Belle thought. They didn’t know each other, they’d never see one another again after tonight. This situation was so fucked up, and she had no idea whether either of them would feel this way in the morning. Whatever this was, it had no life after tonight. 

Her heart still soared at his praise, his earnest eyes telling her he meant every word, and more, with his whole heart. 

For what she did next, Belle made no apologies.

His mouth tasted like the coffee they’d just finished, and the cold night air. She pressed her lips softly to his, and tried to drink him in, to enjoy the final moments of this experience. She couldn’t let him go without a kiss goodbye. 

She pulled back a moment later. He hadn’t moved, not to kiss her back or to push her away. The look on his face when she looked up, stunned and helpless, his eyes still closed, was forever seared into her memory. 

His eyes fluttered open, and for a moment she was terrified she’d misread the situation, that he saw her as a daughter or a little sister, that she’d ruined whatever rare, precious thing had grown between them. It was on her lips to apologise, her feet already itching to run to her car and drive away without a backward glance. 

She saw Eli’s mind catch up with him, his eyes clearing and focusing. Then, his free hand cupped her cheek, and he pulled her closer, crushing his mouth to hers. Their first kiss had been tentative, a brush of lips, a question. This kiss was the opposite: he devoured her, his lips working skilfully over hers, plucking and caressing her, his tongue dipping out to taste her. She opened her mouth under his, moaning as his tongue twined with hers. She buried her hands in his hair, finally feeling the soft, thick strands run through her fingers. She kissed him back with just as much enthusiasm. It was ridiculous, but kissing him felt like coming home.

They came up for air, at last, but once he’d started Eli had no intention of stopping. He kissed her again, and again, deep drugging kisses that sent Belle’s head spinning. He kissed her desperately, like he needed her, like she was all that kept him grounded to the earth. It was completely at odds with his hands, tender on her cheek and tentative on her waist, holding her close without containing her. 

Belle moaned in the back of her throat as he nipped softly at her lower lip, his tongue instantly soothing the soft bite. It was nothing like Killian’s wet, possessive kissing; his hands didn’t grab her, or hold her in place. It felt more like a dance, like they were partners in this in the same way they had been partners in destroying the Jolly Roger. 

Finally, she wrenched herself back, stumbling a little as she lost her balance. He caught her, his hands firm on her waist for just a moment. They were off her instantly, skirting up her sides, finding her arms, holding her steady with the lightest of touches. 

“I’m sorry,” he panted, and she couldn’t understand why. 

“No, no,” she shook her head, trying to articulate what she needed, what both Belle and Lacey wanted. No matter who she was, or what she was, or where she would be tomorrow, she knew what she needed right here and now. 

“Belle?”

He looked down at her with heartbreaking concern. She loved him in every worried, soft, sweet line and plane of his face. Her hand cradled his cheek again; he kissed her palm.

“The back of your car?” she suggested, softly, hoping she wouldn’t have to articulate further. “P-please, Eli?”

He nodded, as if he couldn’t say no, as if he couldn’t believe she was asking. She took his free hand in hers and gripped it tight, running her thumb over his knuckles. It felt as if her hand was made to fit with his.

She half-ran, dragging him with her to his car. She leaned back against it as he caught up, and braced his weight against the hood, abandoning his cane so he could pin her there. He kissed her again, deep and hot, and she moaned in the back of her throat. Her hands were back in his hair; she couldn’t seem to help herself.

Belle arched her hips up, grinding against him. He groaned, pulling back and breaking their kiss to rest his forehead against hers. Her hand snaked down between them, and pressed between his legs. He was half-hard already, just from their kissing.

How long had it been for him? How long had Mila been too busy fucking someone else’s boyfriend to touch her own husband?

It wasn’t right: he was married, although it was so easy to forget that that mattered with what they now knew about Mila and Killian. For Belle’s part, she already felt free from her half of the equation. Killian was Lacey’s boyfriend, and with every touch of Eli’s mouth to hers, Belle felt Lacey slip further and further away. Killian had done her a favour, in an odd sense: his betrayal had forced her to open her eyes, and finally come back to herself.

“Is this okay?” she whispered, and knew this time her meaning was unambiguous. He breathed heavily; she could feel it against her mouth, low and shuddering.

He kissed her again, and she took that for his answer. His hand fumbled behind her, getting the car door unlocked. He pulled her back, and between them they got the door properly open, so she could sit on the edge of the plush red leather seat and scoot backward.

“This is a mobster car, Eli,” she said, with a little laugh. “I thought you were a Mafioso, when I first saw you.”

Eli shrugged, absently. He seemed distracted by the way her skirt had ridden up her thighs. “It serves its purpose,” he said. She cocked her head to one side; she subtly pulled her skirt up a little higher, until it barely covered her knickers.

She’d come to hate these tiny, tight dresses. They’d felt liberating once, but she’d recently only kept wearing them because they drove Killian insane. He didn’t like how other men stared at her in them, but he also liked to stare, and for those same men to know she was his. She wasn’t his anymore. They weren’t comfortable, and they sure as hell weren’t practical. Well, she corrected with a little smirk, it was very practical right now. 

“What purpose was that?” she asked. Eli dragged his gaze away from the tops of her thighs, and looked at her eyes.

“To intimidate,” he told her. “My tenants, my clients, anyone who needs to know who’s in charge. It’s a scare tactic.”

“You’re not really intimidating, Eli,” Belle told him, softly. “You shouldn’t have to try.”

“And you’re really not reckless or selfish,” Eli replied, an answer she more than deserved. “But you’ve spent years trying to be both.”

“Touché,” she swallowed, and pulled back a little, wondering if this was a bad idea. “Eli – ”

“Belle, I…” he shook his head, and slid into the car beside her at last, closing the door behind him. She surged up on her knees, and kissed him deeply, pulling him to her with both her hands on the sides of his head. He kissed her back, pulling at her, hauling her into his lap. It was difficult, uncomfortable, all elbows and knees, but eventually he was sat in the centre of the back seat, and she was in his lap, straddling his hips with her knees. 

It didn’t matter what they were going to say before, whatever words had been lost between them. What mattered was that he was here, beneath her, around her, surrounding her. For whatever little time they had, they were together. Mila, Killian, the ghost of Lacey and the wreck of the Jolly Roger, all faded into the background. Belle felt like she was waking up, like this was the first choice she’d made for herself in years. She wasn’t doing this to hurt Killian, or to prove something to herself, or to let go of her mother, or to piss off her father. Everything that had happened or might happen between herself and Eli happened only because she wanted it, and because he wanted it too.

“Are you sure?” she asked, softly. “Two wrongs don’t make a right, you know.”

“She’s already gone,” Eli said. “I doubt she’ll even care.”

“She’s insane,” Belle told him, pushing his hair back, kissing him gently. “You’re worth holding onto, Eli.”

He made a noise, a soft sound between a moan and a sob, kissing her again as his hands clumsily pulled at her little skirt, gathering it up around her hips. Her fingers found the flies and button of his fine wool trousers. She’d done this before, in more cramped spaces than this. He sighed, low and soft against her throat, when she had him free and in her hand, hot and hard.

She was distracted by his hand between her legs. Two fingers hooked into the scrap of lace and pulled it aside, and she jolted and shuddered when his knuckles brushed her folds. She didn’t usually need a lot of warming up – a benefit, since Killian didn’t indulge in much foreplay – but she sure as hell wasn’t complaining. Eli’s fingers ran up and down her folds, and she cried out, her hips jerking and bucking when his thumb chanced upon her clit.

“Right there,” she whispered, her back bowing forward as he rubbed at her, “That’s right, yes!”

“You’re so wet,” he marvelled, “you’re so wet… for me?”

“I want you,” she moaned, “thought I’d made that obvious.”

He petted at her, stroking over and over with the same tender purpose he’d shown everywhere else, an intoxicating mix of gentle and firm that made her whimper and drive her hips down to meet his hand. It had been a long time since anyone had spent real time building her up, and she’d forgotten how much better a sensitive, caring hand could feel compared with her own. 

She moved her hand on him, trying to give him back even just a little of what he’d given her. His hand stilled between her legs when she worked at him, sliding her hand back and forth. It couldn’t be the best hand job she’d ever given, since they were cramped and she had to go slowly and fairly light to compensate for the lack of lubrication. His eyes still slammed shut, and he still moaned at the contact. For a few long, glorious minutes, his fingers worked her up and up, slipping and sliding and stroking at her folds and clit, and she began to really enjoy the feeling of his hot, heavy cock in her hand. It was perfectly sized, she thought: it would feel perfect to have him inside her, to ride him to completion.

“I need – god!” he rubbed her in a really good spot, and she lost her train of thought, “Inside me,” she managed. “Need you inside me.”

He groaned aloud at her words, and she worried he’d spill himself in her hand before they got to the main event. “I don’t have a condom,” he panted, shaking his head. “Have to be… careful, sweetheart.” 

She really liked hearing him call her that. It was so much better than ‘Lace’ or ‘love’ or ‘baby’. Although she had a feeling even those tainted endearments might sound better in his rolling brogue, than when Killian weaponised them.

“I do,” she replied. She reached for her handbag on the seat beside them, the movement causing his knuckle to move against her again. She stilled for a moment, whimpering at the pleasure of it. She fumbled in her bag, and pulled out one of the little foil squares buried in the inside pocket. 

When she looked back at him, he was watching her with dark, hooded eyes. “You do this often?” he asked. She swallowed down a biting retort: it was a fair question, even if she did feel like he was judging her for her promiscuity. She’d been monogamous for over a year, but Killian was something of an exhibitionist.

“I used to,” she replied, honestly. “And sometimes… well, you know who I’ve been living with. It’s useful to be prepared.”

“That it is,” he agreed. He swallowed hard, and she watched his Adam’s apple bob. “I wasn’t implying anything,” he clarified, nervously. “I just don’t want to be a disappointment. Can’t say I’ve done this in a while, and I’ve never been – well, I’ve never been all that skilled.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. She wanted to go back to that bar, and slam Eli’s cane into Mila’s skull like she had Killian’s windscreen. Whatever Killian had done to her, Mila had clearly done far worse to Eli. 

“You’re wonderful,” she told him, focusing on opening the packet and sliding the slick latex over his erection. “You won’t disappoint me. You already bothered with foreplay,” she reminded him, snickering. “You’re doing better than the last guy.”

“My wife doesn’t – doesn’t like that,” he groaned, his hips bucking against hers, “She likes a man to get to the point.”

“They deserve each other, then,” Belle replied, holding his face in her hands, kissing him again, “It sounds like she’s as crap at sex as he is. But let’s not mention them again, okay?”

He nodded, eagerly. “I don’t want to think about her, or him. I want to think about you, Belle.”

How he could make her blush so easily, make her feel so warm and so special with just a simple statement, she had no idea. It was something to do with the earnestness in his eyes, she thought: the way he really, truly meant it.

“Me too,” she replied, honestly. “All I want right now is you.”

She rose up on her knees, and he held her underwear to the side as she slid down on him, his cock sliding deep inside her. They moaned in unison – he felt so good inside her, hot and deep, a perfect fit. She rose up and sank back down again, the friction divine. His hand kept holding her underwear, positioning his knuckle just right to grind against her clit on every in-stroke. It was exquisite.

She kissed him, her mouth opening on a whimper as she did. It was a messy kiss, all tongues and teeth, loose-lipped with gasps and moans. His hand dug into her waist, his hips bucking up to meet hers as she drove herself down again and again. He felt amazing inside her, and she was already so on-edge, her heart racing and pleasure coiling tighter and tighter inside her, ready to explode at any moment.

His fingers moved, slipping deeper into her folds. He rubbed her clit hard with the pad of his thumb, and Belle howled, throwing her head back. “I can’t last much longer,” he said, kissing her exposed throat. “You said… you said you liked that.”

“I do,” she agreed, panting. “Keep going!” She kissed him deeply, bracing herself on his shoulders. He pressed his thumb to her clit and let her rolling hips do the rest, and the combination of his cock hard and deep inside her and that pressure drove her up, and up, and up, until she thought she might explode.

She twisted her hips a little, and entirely by accident the angle changed and he was suddenly hitting another spot inside her, somewhere that made her moan on every thrust inside. Belle keened, and when his thumb ground against her clit she felt the tension release inside her, pleasure racing through her like she’d been set alight. Her thighs tightened around his hips, and she bucked and writhed in his arms, her folds clenching around his hard cock as she came with a sharp cry.

She felt him follow her over the edge a moment later, his face going slack on a long, low groan. He thrust up hard inside her once, twice, riding out his orgasm as Belle twitched with the aftershock.

They were both panting from the exertion, the windows fogged with their breathing. For a moment of afterglow, she still clung to him, her hands clenched in his coat, her head buried in his shoulder. They sat like that for a long moment, and she felt his hesitant hands come to rest against her back, holding her close without restraining her. She breathed him in, and wished she could make these brief seconds stretch, that she could live in these soft, ambiguous moments with him wrapped around her in this tiny, warm little world they’d made for themselves.

Belle felt him soften inside her and slip out, and mourned the loss of him when he did. They had to move. There was no more prolonging this, nothing that could make the moment last any longer. She kissed him, softly; she wanted to cry at how gently he kissed her back. Then, her heart breaking with every inch, she pulled away.

She clambered down from on top of him, and straightened her underwear and her skirt while he found a tissue to clean himself up. 

“I should go,” she said, hating the taste of every word. 

She sat down beside him on the seat, and scooted over to open the door. She wished he would stop her, his hand on her wrist or her waist as she pulled away from him, and ask for a last name, or a phone number, or any other way to find her. 

The door opened; his hands stayed where they were. Harsh streetlight flooded in, ruining their dark little utopia. She turned back to him, unwilling to let it end without a final word.

“I… thank you, Eli. For everything.”

She meant it, and hoped he could hear that she did.

“I should be thanking you, Belle,” he replied. His eyes were on his belt, still straightening his immaculate appearance. She didn’t think he would ever look at her again, and the thought carried a cold weight in the pit of her stomach. “For the strangest night of my life.”

She nodded at that, an odd laugh escaping her. “Yeah, it’s been that,” she agreed. “I – good luck with everything. I hope you finally get the life you deserve.”

“You too, Belle,” he said, and to her relief and delight, he chanced a look at her then. His eyes were huge and dark, begging her to stay; desperate for her to go and for it all to be over. She could drown in those eyes. “I hope you find the life you’re looking for.”

This was how she knew it was time to let Lacey go, she thought. Lacey’s heartstrings were never this easy to pull. She wanted to hug him close and never let go. 

She pulled back, and slipped out of the car, rising to her feet. She wobbled a little in her high heels, her legs still a little weak from the pleasure he’d given her. She turned back to him, and raised her hand in a final wave. It was such a strange, small way to say goodbye after all they’d shared tonight. He didn’t look at her; he didn’t see it.

Belle swallowed hard. She turned her back, and was thankful he couldn’t see her face anymore. She brushed the tears on her cheeks away, and returned to her car.

She looked back once as she drove away. He was still sat in the back seat of his Cadillac. It seemed he hadn’t moved.

Belle took a deep breath, and pulled out onto the highway.


	4. Return

The Boston Public Library had a great many virtues. It was grand, beautiful, and impressively old – well, at least by American standards. It housed millions of books for public perusal, and almost always had whatever Eli required should he be unwilling to buy a copy for himself. Best of all, it was open, for free, on a Saturday afternoon, and boasted a children’s section with activities that made for a good distraction for Bae to kill an hour or two before Mila could meet them.

Overall, separation wasn’t so terrible. They almost made it work. He brought Bae to Boston every other weekend to spend Saturday night with his mother and her boyfriend, and she called every other night to talk to Bae on the phone. Contact between Eli and his soon-to-be-ex wife was limited to handing over their child, and answering phone calls. Everything else was done through a lawyer. 

It almost worked. It almost made everyone happy. It was a damn sight better than the hell that had preceded it. 

He didn’t miss, however, the way Bae fidgeted with his shoelaces, and did not seem not overly invested in the story a young male librarian was reading to the group of assembled children. Eli sighed: he had hoped dearly that the heroic tale of a crocodile and his friends on an adventure would distract his son. He was growing keenly aware, these past months since Mila moved out, of how little Bae really enjoyed these visits to his mother.

“Eli?” a voice – impossible, but often dreamed of – came from behind him. He closed his eyes, and sighed. He was always imagining her, but there was no way-  
“Elias Gold?”

He turned slowly, holding out for a disappointment. There was no way serendipity would be this kind, after all this time. He saw her before his eyes every night when he tried to sleep, but she wasn’t real to him, not anymore. Over a year since their night together, and Belle had become more a figment of his dreams than a real, living memory. 

But then, there she was. Belle smiled up at him, her eyes bright and ecstatic, shining the exact same periwinkle blue he remembered. She looked different, a million miles from the hard, sharp, bright, broken thing he’d met destroying her boyfriend’s car outside a bar in the middle of nowhere. Her skirt fell in soft folds to her knees, her blouse and cardigan sweet and prim. She’d gained a little weight, and it suited her, filled her out somehow. She wore her hair down. He wondered if she ever put it up, these days. 

“Belle,” he breathed, drinking her in. A lump formed in his throat. She was twice as beautiful as he remembered, and better yet, she was real!

Then, miraculously, she was in his arms, hugging him tight like an old friend. The feeling of her pressed against him, soft curves and delicate bones, with a deceptive strength in the strong arms around his shoulders, was exquisite. He hugged her back, holding her as tight and close as he dared. He had missed her so much he couldn’t breathe.

She pulled back a moment later, still all smiles. Here, in this sunlit library on a Saturday afternoon, it was hard to believe the last time he’d seen her was over a year ago, driving away in shame after a one-night-stand in the back of his car. But then, looking at her now, it was hard to believe she would ever engage in such behaviour at all. She was a vision of sunlight and beauty, without a curl out of place.

“What’re you doing here?” she asked, excitedly. He gestured behind him.

“My son likes the readings,” he said, a little lamely. “We had some time to kill.”

“Oh!” Belle looked behind him, as if she were trying to spot Bae in the crowd. She couldn’t: she’d seen a photograph of him only once, and that a long time ago now. However well he remembered her, he was amazed she recognised him at all. “Do you live in the city, then?”

There was a flicker in her eyes, something he recognised from before, just a flash of that old desperation. She was hungry for details, and he remembered belatedly how little of himself he’d really shared that night. He’d shared his soul, his weaknesses and humiliations, but no real, hard details. Even his name, she had had to barter out of him.

“No,” he said, bracing his hands on his cane. “We live up in Maine, a little town called Storybrooke.”

“Ah,” Belle said. An odd, wistful, not entirely happy smile came to her lips. “I’m guessing it’s about twice as far away as Longbourne.”

He nodded, not even having to think about it. The main highway to Boston from Storybrooke ran right past the diner where they’d spent those unforgettable hours together. He saw it every time he drove past. He imagined that was also why that bar had become Mila and Killian’s rendezvous point: it was equidistant from both hometowns. 

“You just get on the highway, and drive as far again,” he said. “It’s only a few hours.”

He didn’t know why he made it sound like an invitation, as if he were offering instructions and not just a neutral answer to her question. She didn’t question it, in any case.

“How come you came into the city?” she asked, then. “Just a day out?”

“I’m taking Bae to visit his mother,” he replied, taking a deep breath. There it was, then: the truth, the answer to a question she hadn’t yet asked, but was definitely going to. It mattered to him that she knew his marriage was over. He didn’t know why – something to do with those perfect eyes, and the memory of his name gasped from her lips and her body pressed against his, he reckoned – but it did.

When Mila had left, just days after his encounter with Belle, Eli had expected to fall apart without her. He’d struggled so long to keep her around, to hold their family together, that he knew she expected – perhaps even hoped – he’d crumble in her absence, missing her desperately. 

Instead, all he’d felt was a swelling sense of relief, as if a great tension had been lifted. Bae missed her at first, but as the months wore on even he seemed happier with the arrangement, without the constant screaming and fighting between his parents. And Mila, now fully installed with her boyfriend in his apartment in Boston, was definitely better off.

When Eli tried to sleep at night, when the house was silent and his bed was cold and lonely, he didn’t find himself pining for Mila. Absurdly, unreasonably, the person he’d wanted to share those moments with was the woman before him. He felt he’d loved Belle more deeply in that one night, than he had Mila in their entire marriage. 

“Ah,” Belle’s lips pursed, and she looked away. He had the distinct impression she was trying not to smile. “I’m sorry, Eli.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he told her. It was important she know that, in case she felt any guilt over what they’d done. “She was already gone, long before she actually moved out. Things are quieter now.”

Belle nodded, and stopped fighting the smile on her face. “Well, in that case I’m glad it worked out,” she said. “You do seem less miserable than you were when we met.”

He nodded, although he wasn’t sure it was true. She was looking at a skewed sample: any lightness he felt right now, he attributed to having finally found her again. “How about you?” he asked. “Am I talking to Lacey or Belle?”

“I followed through,” she told him. Her smile could have lit the whole city. “I laid Lacey to rest with the Jolly Roger. You’re now speaking to Belle French, qualified librarian. I graduated my master’s last month.”

She tapped her name badge proudly, all but bouncing in her sweet red heels. He felt so proud of her he could burst. 

“You work here?” he asked, filing her full name and place of employment away for later use. She hadn’t told him any more than he had, that night, and he was just 

“I do,” she said, grinning. “They don’t let me do much, since I’m so junior, but it’s a start. And it’s wonderful to be around books again.”

“Did-“ Eli started, stopped, and swallowed. “Mila knew I was responsible for the car,” he said. “I hope you didn’t face any repercussions?”

Belle shook her head; her soft dark curls swayed with the motion. “He had no idea I was even there that night,” she told him. “And I didn’t think he needed to know. Did he… oh god, did he come after you? I’ll be your alibi, or-or fess up, if you need me to?”

Eli shook his head, “No, in the end Mila felt her leaving was punishment enough. I’d left payment for the damage done, and as I never openly admitted to it, they knew they’d have no evidence to prove I was responsible. And honestly, I believe the damage we did frightened Jones enough to keep him from trying to physically intimidate me.”

Belle giggled, a lovely sound. “I can imagine,” she said. “He came home that night while I was packing, all full of righteous, wounded anger. I told him he could cry about it to his other woman, and left. I had to get a new phone after the hundredth voicemail from him, but it was worth it. And I finally got my friends back since I left him. Mulan and Rory even let me stay with them while I found a new place.”

It was Eli’s turn to repress an inappropriate smile. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “And congratulations on your qualification.”

“Thanks!” She was still smiling at him, and he knew he was ruined then: he was just as addicted to her smiles now as he had been the last time he saw her. “It was a lot of work going back to school, but it was the right time, you know? And a lot of that was thanks to you. You should know that. I wouldn’t have done any of this if it weren’t for you.”

Eli swallowed, hard. It was good to know he wasn’t the only one who had been changed by their encounter. He had been a whole new man, when he was finally able to move from the back of his car, and drive home. 

“I looked for you,” he told her, and instantly regretted it. The words had just slipped out, unfiltered, and now she would think he was a stalker or worse. “But I didn’t know your full name, and I could hardly ask Mila for her boyfriend’s ex’s address.”

“He wouldn’t have helped anyhow,” she said, a little apologetically. “I changed all my contact details when I left him. He didn’t even know my legal name.” To his relief, she wasn’t recoiling or looking afraid of him. Her eyes had narrowed, with that dangerously perceptive look in her eyes. Her head tilted to one side as she regarded him. “I looked for you too,” she admitted, at last. “But there are a number of Elias Golds in Massachusetts alone, and I didn’t know if you’d want to be found.”

“I had the same concern,” he confessed. “I didn’t want to intrude on the new life you wanted to create.”

“You could have,” she said, a little too quickly. “I mean it wouldn’t have been an intrusion.”

“No?” He hated how hopeful he sounded, how vulnerable he felt with her. She shook her head, slowly, her eyes sparkling.

“No,” she said, firmly.

Behind them, he heard the story finish and the children applauding dutifully. He had a minute, maybe less, before Bae would be tugging at his trouser leg, reminding him he’d promised ice cream for good behaviour.

“What’re you doing tonight?” she asked, before he could think of something to say. He gaped at her for a moment, before closing his mouth and stammering a response. 

“Nothing,” he said, trying to sound cooler than he did. “Why?”

“You don’t have to go home to Maine?” she checked. He shook his head.

“I stay in the city when Bae stays with his mother,” he replied. “Considering the company she keeps, I like to be within striking distance.”

Belle’s face clouded, her smile faltering a little. “They’re still together, then?” she asked, quietly. He nodded.

“Yes. So I stay in a hotel room nearby, and if Bae needs me we have an agreed-upon code-word he can say on the phone.”

“Very smart,” Belle nodded, her smile returning. “Well, in that case, would you like to have dinner with me? It’d be good to catch up.”

Eli’s heart hammered in his chest. All the many times he’d imagined her, imagined this reunion, he’d never thought she’d be as happy to see him as he was her. He certainly had never dreamed she’d arrange to see him again. He could hardly form the words to agree, although he couldn’t think of turning her down. 

“I doesn’t have to be anything!” she assured him, quickly. “I mean, I know it’s really weird between us, right? Considering how we met, I mean. And it’s been a long time, so I’m not assuming you’re single or whatever-“

“I am,” he said, quickly, his brain finally catching up. “Single, I mean.”

“Oh, good!” she clamped a hand over her mouth, “I mean, not that- sorry. Anyway, I just mean, we could get dinner as friends, if you wanted. I don’t want to assume anything just because of- of what happened between us before.”

He nodded, slowly. Her rambling was adorable. Her face was flushed, and with just the top section pulled back he could see her ears poking through, red at the tips. He wondered if she was thinking about what had happened that night, and whether she thought about it as much as he did. That wasn’t possible: he thought about it, about her, all the time. He had never felt so connected to anyone as he had her, that night, even before she’d let him touch her. “Well, you could bring your boyfriend, if you wanted?” he said, carefully. “If that would make you more comfortable?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she told him, and he knew she’d seen through his artless ploy instantly. Her smile returned with new confidence. “So, do you want to have dinner with me, Eli?”

He smiled. “I’d love to.”


End file.
